Language and the Malay Muslim Identity: An Insight into Brunei

Abstract

Sitting at a government clinic, a conversation was overheard between a woman and a little girl. They looked characteristically Malay, and because of the hijab on the woman, it was easy to deduce that they are of the Muslim faith. The language used between the mother and her child, however, was unmistakably English with the child almost monolingually so. The mother’s utterances, on the other hand, were dotted with some Malay words like the bah particle, but English was noticeably dominant. At a small café in a neighbourhood shopping complex, a group of impressionable young Bruneian ladies were animatedly talking about their driving experiences. Again, the conversation was mostly in English, with a few Malay words inserted every now and then. Like the mother in the previous scene, the ladies were all clad in hijabs, and the authors’ assumptions that they are Malay and Muslims were unanimously confirmed by the subjects themselves.